Conservatives Are Now Getting Angry About Google's Fact-Checking Module

Paranoid conservatives have increasingly become certain Google is trying to silence them, citing its firing of engineers who allegedly created hostile work environments and a largely illusory panic about YouTube censorship. Now, according to Tucker Carlson’s flagship site the Daily Caller, they’re worried Google’s new fact-checking initiative—recently installed as part of Google’s response to a backlash against misinformation in search results—is targeting conservatives.

Here’s what they’re mad about. Google the name of a publication and the search engine will display a sidebar with some information about it, like what it covers. This is what you see when you search “Gizmodo,” for example.

For some publications that have drawn the attention of Google’s third-party fact checkers like Snopes, though, the module displays an extra “Reviewed Claims” section. The Daily Caller is one of those sites and is pretty angry about it; it and others including Washington Free Beaconwriter Alex Griswold contend that Google has mostly applied this tool to right-wing media. The Daily Caller calls it “downright libelous.”

It’s nice that Google is making an effort to flag misinformation. But let’s be real, this fact-checking module isn’t really all that useful—finding it requires clicking through to a submenu in a sidebar, and once the user’s there the module’s crowded with cut-off sentences and poorly contextualized information.

Displaying semi-random, individual “reviewed claims” doesn’t do anything to show a user whether a site is generally reliable. It would probably be simpler and more intuitive to display a message saying “Google’s third-party fact-checkers have questioned the reliability of this source. Click here for more context.”

Moreover, the Daily Caller correctly pointed out that the module had flagged one of its stories, saying it made the false claim that “The people that have been hired” for Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the election “were all Hillary Clinton supporters.” That’s actually a Donald Trump quote that didn’t even appear in the Daily Caller’s article. The “fact check by” section of the module linked to a separate article by the Washington Post which had nothing to do with the Caller.

So their claim Google’s cluttered module appears to be muddling up is embarrassingly true. Yet let’s note that can be fixed, and inserting some fact-checking into a sub-menu in the sidebar of search results is not exactly a full assault on the Daily Caller. It’s not even clear having a fact-checking module appear alongside searches for a publication’s name could noticeably impact the regular SEO referrals they’re getting traffic from, which is what generates views.

As to the meat of the thing good conservatives are supposed to get angry about: Is Google flagging more right-leaning sites for review than left-leaning ones? Probably. But, uh, that’s also probably because a massive segment of the conservative media, particularly newer digital ventures like the Caller, are completely fine with brazen distortion and aren’t interested in the same journalistic standards as most parts of the mainstream media.

Griswold did post a list of sites Google failed to provide fact-checking modules for. It included oft-sensationalist sites (Raw Story), publications that maintain large networks of poorly-vetted contributor content alongside their paid professional staff (Huffington Post), and definitely dubious sources (conspiracy site Infowars, which should absolutely be flagged). It also includes a grab-bag of random left-leaning blogs and publications conservatives hate, ignoring the possibility these sites may not be spreading enough viral misinformation to attract the attention of professional fact checkers.

The mélange of sites Daily Caller and Griswold are complaining Google is unfairly fact-checking include far-right nuthouses like Breitbart, Daily Wire, Free Republic, World Net Daily, something called “Conservative Treehouse,” and a bevy of white supremacist outlets. More traditional conservative outlets like the National Review, the Washington Free Beacon, and the Weekly Standard don’t generate fact-checking modules either.

The takeaway from all this? Google’s trying to deliver more accurate results, but so far the results are mixed. Doth the Daily Caller protest too much? Oh, baby, absolutely.

22 Comments

It’s not targeting conservatives. It’s targeting misinformation, be it deliberate or incidental. The fact that conservative ‘news’ outlets are overflowing with more bullshit than a cattle ranch is hardly the fault of Google Analytics and Search Results doing their job....

This reminds me of confederates/hardcore racists sugar-coating their pride and reasoning for their celebrating, even admitting of wanting racism/slavery back but never admitting their racism to people that suspect, and take offense for it. White people = afraid of the word “racist”

What percentage of self-proclaimed conservatives read respected conservative publications like the Wall Street Journal or the Weekly Standard anymore? It seems like a increasingly small number. The conservative movement is bifurcated between an educated, wealthy elite and an undereducated, poorer base for whom critical evaluation of current events is not something they have been trained to do.

I haven’t seen any of the more traditional or well-respected conservative publications get flagged with one of these modules. Given prior discussions I’ve had with Google, I doubt that anyone is manually adding these sites on their end.

It will never, ever, *ever* reach the usefulness that made left-wingers get all butt-hurt when Donald Trump was elected POTUS, most powerful person in the world, though. The reaction from left-wingers when that happened? Best, ‘most useful’ Christmas present... ever.

The only problem I see with this is that Infowars is on the list of sites apparently NOT fact checked. Because, bull, that is some man-shit. They are one of the biggest screechers of the bullshit about how “both sides are the same.” And didn’t they invent the whole Pizza-sex ring story? Also, how do we know Google ISN’T fact checking left wing sites? Not lying doesn’t stop people from cross-examining you, it just means you don’t have any lies to get caught up in.

Is Google flagging more right-leaning sites for review than left-leaning ones? Probably. But, uh, that’s also probably because a massive segment of the conservative media, particularly newer digital ventures like the Caller, are completely fine with brazen distortion and aren’t interested in the same journalistic standards as most parts of the mainstream media. True. Also, this reminds me of a story. Way back in 2014, Facebook introduced a Trending news section, wherein news that was, uh, trending would appear. They recognized that a lot of people were using their website, and they wanted to keep those people informed, so they had to figure out how to keep the Trending news section informative instead of misinformative. They had to figure out how to keep “fake news” from the Trending news. So they set up lists of which online sources had some kind of authority/journalistic standards and which ones didn’t, and they tried to keep items from the latter column from appearing on Trending news. This meant that websites which have no journalistic standards (e.g., Drudge) did not get high authority. Two years later (a major election year in America! what are the odds), one website heard about this from a disgruntled former employee; said disgruntled former employee claimed that Facebook routinely suppressed news stories of interest to conservative readers The website’s writer asked other former employees of Facebook if this claim was true. The other employees of Facebook stated that this claim was not true: Other former curators interviewed by [website] denied consciously suppressing conservative news The website’s writer even stated: there is no evidence that Facebook management mandated or was even aware of any political bias at work. But the website still chose to publish this article, based on one disgruntled former employee’s claims, with the headline Former Facebook Workers: We Routinely Suppressed Conservative News This quickly became a US conservative talking point. Faced with large amounts of partisan vitriol, Facebook drastically changed how their Trending news module worked, almost definitely for the worse. Months later, another former Facebook employee directly blamed [website’s] poor coverage of this issue as a motivator for that change. Thankfully, that website has become better over time. I assume.

Tom, how does google attribute claims to certain sites? I googled “Counterpunch” and the ‘reviewed claims’ tab pointed to a Snopes article about sexual assault allegations against Bill Clinton, which Snopes concluded were unproven. But in reading the Snopes article, I see no references to the claim being made by Counterpunch. So how is Google tying the two together? https://www.snopes.com/bill-clinton-expelled-from-oxford/

I searched Counterpunch itself for the name of the accuser and found this: https://www.counterpunch.org/2016/11/04/at-least-40-women-have-accused-bill-clinton-or-donald-trump-of-sexual-assault/ 1/ Eileen Wellstone accused Bill Clinton of raping her at Oxford in 1969. Capitol Hill Blue, a kind of pre-cursor to Politico which reported positively and negatively on both parties from inside the Washington D.C. beltway, confirmed the accusationwith Ms. Wellstone in 1999 and found a key State Department official who had originally investigated the accusation to support the claim. So all Counterpunch did was cite a different, more mainstream, publication’s reporting. Interestingly when you google “Capitol Hill Blue” the Snopes article related to Ms. Wellstone’s allegations does not show up. In fact no ‘reviewed claims’ show up at all. So why was only Counterpunch flagged? Could it be because of their independent(definitely not conservative) status?

I’ll try and follow up on this. This is why I think a better solution might be to flag sites their third party fact checkers id without getting into the granular stuff- it introduces all these opportunity for error.

“After playing around myself, here are the websites I found that trigger Google’s fact-check feature. Almost universally conservative websites, but also white supremacists... THIS BULLSHIT DETECTOR IS BAD BECAUSE IT IS DETECTING OUR BULLSHIT!” - Alex Griswold